Growing Pains of a Young Hero
by Immicolia
Summary: Edo likes comic books.  Edo has Dead!Daddy Issues.  Edo wants to be Batman when he grows up.  This covers all of that, and then some.


One of Edo's earliest memories of his father (one of the very few and far between ones that doesn't involve That Night and is jealously guarded and held close) is of his comic collection. Of being snuggled safe and warm in his father's lap while age-yellowed pages with fading ink are carefully turned. Listening in silent awe to stories of heroes and villains, eyes wide as he drinks in every detail of the action on the page, and eventually he even learned to read using the damn things.

He knows now that his father's collection of Golden Age books is probably worth a small fortune to the right buyer. Is even amazed on some level that his father had risked them being damaged by small hands that didn't know enough to be careful. All of them carefully packed away now, stored for safekeeping and Edo travels so much he hasn't looked at them in years.

They're never far from his mind, though.

o o o

He's told that for the first three days after his father died (was killed) he cried. Steadily and inconsolably, until one day he simply stopped. Like a switch had suddenly gone off.

In retrospect (with the distance of years and the aid of the simple fact that he doesn't really remember any of this at all except for maybe in the vaguest sense) Edo thinks that it may have been less like a switch and more like a short. His emotions so overloaded that some sort of mental fuse blew and no one has been by to replace it in running on ten years now.

o o o

One month after DD adopted him, Edo broke his leg trying to swing out of a tree. It could have been much worse, he could have cracked his idiot skull open, and he remembers being lectured for a good hour on his foolishness.

He also remembers his excuse.

He had been training.

For what?

To be Batman.

o o o

Everything is so simple and clear cut when you are a child. Even vengeance.

At six, Edo decided that he would find the man who hurt (killed) his father and make sure he was punished. Everything so perfectly simple and easy and clear-cut in his mind. He would be a hero. He would make sure no one would ever hurt like he had to hurt again.

At sixteen he still intends to hunt the sonofabitch who murdered his father down. Hunt him down like a dog and make him pay for those three days worth of tears Edo shed when he was a boy. For those three days of tears and for the fact that he can't cry at all anymore. Can't feel anything except the hate.

Make the bastard pay in blood if he has to.

o o o

He still sits up half the night reading comic books.

The more serious part of him thinks it's stupid. The damn things aren't real after all, and yet there is still an honest truth to them. A cracked mirror view of the world. Twisted and bent and fragmented, yet still showing the life as it is: ugly and cold and hard, but there are still heroes out there. There are still those who live for justice.

So he reads them, although he doesn't quite enjoy them. Not the way he used to Before.

Now he lives by them.

o o o

Things were supposed to get easier after he knew the truth. When he found his father's killer. When the bastard finally faced justice.

There is no relief though, just more pain. The plain and simple truth that the past ten years have been nothing more than lies upon lies. That the man who told him that everything would be fine when he woke up screaming at night, is the man who caused all those nightmares in the first place.

Even Saiou he has trouble looking in the face. No matter how many times he says (as a reassurance to himself as much as it is for the other man) that it isn't Saiou's fault. That there is no way he would have been able to say anything about the location of that card (and ultimately his father's killer) while possessed.

There is an irrational portion of his mind that doesn't believe it. That doesn't and never will.

o o o

He knows that, in the end, a hero's life is nothing more than constant pain and trial.

Just as he knows that, in the end, he's not the hero.

Because he saved no one. Nothing. It was all Judai.

And he hates it, for the simple truth that it is.


End file.
